Language

Forked tongues

The limits of my language are the limits of my world, according to Wittgenstein. Now Chile is taking the philosopher at his word, with a nationwide attempt to turn its 15 million citizens into English speakers. Chile's government is seeding English teaching throughout its education system, along with tax breaks for companies offering English training, under a programme named English Opens Doors. The programme's head of recruiting talks of an army of teachers and of saturating the country with English textbooks. The intention is to make the country bilingual within a generation. "If you can't speak English, you can't sell and you can't learn," argues the education minister. "Para afrontar un mundo globalizado [In order to face a globalised world]" was how Argentina's La Nacion newspaper sniffily described the policy.

Chile's exercise is unique: it is hard to think of another country adopting a second language, without previous colonial ties, such as Malaysia, or a significant linguistic enclave, such as Canada. It is perhaps only rivalled in scope by Kemal Ataturk's modernisation of Turkey's language in 1928, switching from Arabic script to the Roman alphabet.

Chile's decision will hardly be welcomed by its neighbours. It may cheer Little Englanders who see language as a sign of cultural prowess. But it would be foolish to pretend there is anything intrinsically superior about English as a language; Chile's enthusiasm merely reflects admiration of the economic strength of the US. Paradoxically, English speakers within the US are now expected to be outnumbered by Spanish speakers within a generation or two.

The strange thing is that Castilian Spanish (Chile's numero uno ) is hardly an exotic specimen: it is the world's third most widely spoken language, behind English and Mandarin, in use by more than 400 million people. Yet it is Chile's socialist government that is promoting English and offering language training that was previously only available to the wealthy. The concern remains that this is merely capitulation to the might of the US, by deed and by word.